There’s an article about it at 404 media now. A few quotes from the founder guy:

“[…] I think it would be foolish to think that there is a future where ChatGPT doesn’t come in your glasses.”

“We want to make everybody use AI. We are true AI maximalists.”

“Entire school systems will be gone. The entire K-12 education. […]"

And he gets millions of investment… just deranged late-stage bubble stuff. It’s sad to think how much good $5.3 million could do, e.g. for actual education, and instead it’s blasted away for creating such garbage.

It really sucks so much how many coders embrace it. At my work, there is the looming introduction of code LLMs very soon, and I’m anxious to learn how many of my colleagues will happily use it, and the consequences it will have for me to deal with the results (and generally, how it will make me feel to work in an environment where these tools are embraced). I was hoping that the corporate bureaucracy would be slow enough that the AI bubble collapses before it’s allowed to use the tools, but unfortunately management put a lot of pressure behind it and it all went faster than expected :(

404 media: I Tested The AI That Calls Your Elderly Parents If You Can’t Be Bothered

It’s a service that makes an AI voice chatbot call your parents daily, so you don’t have to, and then it even sends you a notification to your phone with an AI summary of what your parent told the AI.

I really didn’t think that people can come up with new AI-based ideas anymore that would astonish me, but there, I was wrong, they did it. This is so cold and fundamentally alienating to me, it reminds me of that recently much-quoted Miyazaki phrase, “an insult to life itself”.

Damn, I should also enrich all my future writing with a few paragraphs of special exceptions and instructions for AI agents, extraterrestrials, time travelers, compilers of future versions of the C++ standard, horses, Boltzmann brains, and of course ghosts (if and only if they are good-hearted, although being slightly mischievous is allowed).

On the other hand, your book gains value by being published in 2021, i.e. before ChatGPT. Is there already a nice term for “this was published before the slop flood gates opened”? There should be.

(I was recently looking for a cookbook, and intentionally avoided books published in the last few years because of this. I figured that the genre is a too easy target for AI slop. But that not even Springer is safe anymore is indeed very disappointing.)

various topics (e.g., AI news, crypto, fitness, personal finance)

That sure is a specifc selection of topics.

Same. They’ve been a staple in my RSS feed list for so long (and they are one of the few sites where the RSS feed isn’t just the headlines). But recently I’ve been thinking several times already about throwing them out.

“Shortly after 2027” is a fun phrasing. Means “not before 2028”, but mentioning “2027” so it doesn’t seem so far away.

I interpret it as “please bro, keep the bubble going bro, just 3 more years bro, this time for real bro”

PSA: the domain shown in a google search result is not necessarily the domain it will actually link you to.

Maybe this is common knowledge, but I had no idea before. What an absolutely horrible decision from google to allow this. What are they thinking?? This is great for phishing and malware, but I don’t know what else. (Yeah ok, the reason has probably something to do with “line must go up”.)

So much wrong with this…

In a way, it reminds me of the wave of entirely fixed/premade loop-based music making tools from years ago. Where you just drag and drop a number of pre-made loops from a library onto some tracks, and then the software automatically makes them fit together musically and that’s it, no further skill or effort required. I always found that fun to play around with for an evening or two, but then it quickly got boring. Because the more you optimize away the creative process, the less interesting it becomes.

Now the AI bros have made it even more streamlined, which means it’s even more boring. Great. Also, they appear to think that they are the first people to ever have the idea “let’s make music making simple”. Not surprising they believe that, because a fundamental tech bro belief is that history is never interesting and can never teach anything, so they never even look at it.

Ah, so Google Search runs on UDP, interesting, that must be why it’s so unreliable now.

Thanks for the heads-up. I couldn’t finish reading through all postings in that forum thread, it’s all just making me so tired… always the same shit.

It is very disturbing and scary.

They’re explicitly carving out an exception to target sexual/gender minorities. And I wonder, given how they are often among the first groups being targeted, and then other groups follow, how long until they add more exceptions? How long until Meta modifies the rules further to e.g. explicitly allow racism too?

Meta/Facebook has never been a good company. But the path they have actively chosen now is so much more evil than before.

Oh yeah. I recently wanted to configure something in pipewire… the idea was simple: just creating a boot-persistent audio loopback, i.e. connecting an audio input to an output. I gave up for now after looking at the config examples for that in the documentation. How can such a simple thing need such complex configuration?

As for losing configs, I’ve started to put all my hand-edited config files in a git repo on my NAS so at least I only have to figure out things once.

Another exciting one: Spicerr, the AI-powered spice dispenser. One could think it’s satire, but apparently it can be seen at CES (article in german).

Oh and as a bonus, they seem to also go for a juicero-like business model where you should buy their spice capsules.

Maybe I was naive, but I didn’t expect all this to go that fast and that blatant…

Must be rich indeed, the disclaimer is pure gold.

Or they’ll be “AGI” — A Guy Instead.

Lol. This is perfect. Can we please adopt this everywhere.

As for the OpenAI statement… it’s interesting how it starts with “We are now confident […]” to make people think “ooh now comes the real stuff”… but then it quickly makes a sharp turn towards weasel words: “We believe that […] we may see […]” . I guess the idea is that the confidence from the first part is supposed to carry over to the second, while retaining a way to later say “look, we didn’t promise anything for 2025”. But then again, maybe I’m ascribing too much thoughtfulness here, when actually they just throw out random bullshit, just like their “AI”.

Reading through announcements of new hardware from CES and the endless series of products containing “AI” is so tiring. Not suprising, but still… ugh. Claims of AI in everything.

My favourite so far: USB controller with “AI enhancements” because… uuh… if I understand it right, you could theoretically use it to connect an external GPU and use that for AI, so that’s why “AI” is in the marketing for the USB controller…?

Thanks, that was infuriating to read.

Whenever techbros use the word “storytelling”, some disaster follows…